


How Some Children Played at Butcher

by thursdaysisters



Category: Sherlock (TV), Supernatural
Genre: Aliens, Brotherly Love, CIA, M/M, Spooks - Freeform, Spy!Sherlock, hurt!Dean, killer!Sam, lovecraft, spy!Dean, spy!Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-02-17 00:28:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2290262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thursdaysisters/pseuds/thursdaysisters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six months ago a science team was sent into the Afghani desert to investigate an abandoned Russian clinic.  They never returned.  </p><p>Readers will get two things out of this fic:  a) watching the Winchesters desperately pine for one another and b) watching Dean and Sherlock outdo each other in a Who's the Biggest Bastard contest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

A hand-woven rug hung between Agent Winchester and seven chairs from the Department of Defense. The eldest of the seven pointed to a black shape in the corner of the rug with his pen. "A marine brought this home from her last tour in Afghanistan, " he said, looking over his glasses, "Care to enlighten us?"

Sam folded his hands, mindful of the news cameras. "Afghani village women weave all kinds of combat vehicles into their tapestries, possibly it's a helicopter."

The old man's glasses slid to the end of his nose, and he tapped a series of black dots below the mysterious figure. "And what do you make of these?"

"I'm not a textile expert. Depending on the direction they could be shells or strafing or ground-to-air missiles." he babbled, tossing out their favorite toys like chum to circling sharks. The old man didn't bite.

"That's interesting," he said, with a vague nod, "Because they look like footprints to me."

Sam was silent, and the man continued. "Six months ago your department requested funding to send a team of scientists into an unpopulated mountain pass less than ten miles from where this rug was made. They never returned. We'd love to hear your theories."

"My department is working on extracting the team."

One of the chairs opened a case file to the black and white mugshot of Sam's brother, less polished but with the chiseled intensity of a survivalist. "The gunman you sent with them has no prior record of government service. Why choose him over thousands of other more qualified candidates?"

"I trust him."

"And you don't trust your own people?"

"Of course not. They all work for spies."

The cameramen laughed, and stopped beneath the committee's level gaze. "Why were none of the other teammates photographed?"

Sam had practiced this one while shaving in the mirror. "Without the proper security clearance, I cannot divulge details pertaining to an ongoing investigation."

"Alright. What kind of scientific observation could they possibly make in the desert?"

"I'm not at liberty to say. You would have to ask them."

The old man laid down his pen and walked across the room and covered Sam's microphone with his hand. His lips stretched over yellow teeth as if exposing a piece of his skull. "You talk a big game son. But you don't game."

Sam locked eyes with him, knowing if he didn't give up something the DoD would throttle his office with so much red tape it would take eighteen months to sign off on a roll of toilet paper. He waited until the old man was back in his chair and sipped some water and chose his half-truths carefully. "Is the committee familiar with Project Pale Fire?"

When no one answered, Sam said, "Two years ago the Russians deployed a mobile clinic that could enter combat zones via remote control and, according to my sources, far outstrips our American droid medics."

"What sources? Do you have anything concrete you can present to the committee?"

Sam shuddered. He had kept a few of the original photos on his laptop, and burned the really bad ones in his kitchen sink. News cameras zoomed in on his computer screen where two pictures of the same Russian soldier lay side by side. The one on the left was covered in burns, his eyes two broken egg yolks in his head. The other was completely restored. The time stamps between the photos were ten minutes apart.

Sam looked round as the room broke into excited whispers. "The clinic experienced engine failure during a covert mission, and Russia has yet to claim it as their own. My team was sent in to document as much of the technology as possible for the purposes of reverse engineering, since the structure is too big and in too precarious a position to be airlifted out."

The committee members wrote messages to one another on notepads, the rug and its' monstrous footsteps forgotten. "What's your next step, Agent Winchester?"

A small corner of the gunman's mugshot peeked out from the folder, and Sam massaged his throat, afraid his voice would crack. "After so many weeks of radio silence, I have to assume the first team is either captured or... I've already drawn up a proposal to dispatch a second team for intelligence gathering and the retrieval of all, if any, survivors."

A consensus was quickly reached. "The Department of Defense is happy to furnish you with any personnel you might require for this venture."

Sam smiled through the follow-up questions, failing to mention that he'd already tapped a man for the job, not that it would have mattered. None of the people in that room would last two weeks.

(*)

"Hey."

Holmes turned in his chair. A scientist leaned against the doorframe, spreadsheet trailing behind him like a security blanket, hair stuck up like dandelions on a man-shaped stone. "I'm waiting for someone Doctor..." he squinted at the nametag, "...Howard, may I help you?"

"Hey."

He said something else, but it was a bouillabaisse of American slang and engineering jargon, and Holmes noted the man wore paper slippers. The man smiled, no teeth and dark gums.

"Hey."

"I'm sorry, I can't understand you."

"It's alright, Mister Holmes," said Sam, gently prying the scientist from the doorknob, "I see you've met Doctor Howard. Research doing well?"

Howard turned his hollow gaze upward. "Hey."

"Yes, yes," said Sam, patting his shoulder soothingly, "Better get those papers to the lab."

Howard bobbed his head and puttered off, spreadsheet sliding across the carpet long after he turned the corner.

Sam had inherited his office from an ex-NASA wonk, and was continually gifted with the second-hand detritus of the International Space Station. Beneath a row of dog portraits, Holmes watched a 3-D printer sweep layers of plastic dust on the replica of a murder victim's skull. It was incomplete, but he knew the fracture patterns of a tire iron. Holmes considered telling Sam as much when he took one look at the agent's long hair and decided it would be more fun convincing Sam it had been a suicide.

Sam studied the skull, his features up-lit in green. "Amazing what technology can do. What can you tell from this model?"

Holmes didn't have to look at it a second time. "Male, late thirties, Tunisian judging by the earholes but more likely French third generation immigrant. The killer knew him well enough that the blow to the front came as a surprise, before the victim turned away and took the remaining damage across the neck."

"And the killer?"

Holmes rubbed his dry hands together and looked up, sending imaginary pawns and knights and queens across the water-stained ceiling tiles. "Now, the victim has the calcium deposits of an athlete, so the other man would have to exceptionally strong, and the tidy aggregate of the blows says he's a fast runner. It says he never allowed his victim to be out of reach."

Sam loomed over him, fingertips touching the desk. "Does it say how tall he is?"

Holmes never took his eyes off the ceiling. He was two moves away from checkmate. "I thought Americans only killed for money."

"That's not true. Some of us will do it for the look on your face."

"I'm looking at you right now, is that supposed to make me clutch my pearls?"

"Did you read my report on the Pale Fire expedition?"

"Enough to know it's fiction."

Sam sat down, the 3-D printer whirring behind him. "It's not. It's worse."

Holmes pulled out the report and stabbed an empty picture frame with his finger. "There's no record of any of the scientists you have listed here."

A soft rustling noise approached them from the hallway, and Sam ducked his head in faint embarrassment. "You must understand..."

He didn't need to finish the sentence. Scientists didn't retire here. Repositories of all the classified knowledge that got passed around on handwritten notes and then denied during press conferences, they quickly became a security risk in the civilian world, and once outdated were often sent to third world field assignments where even Depression-era technology looks like witchcraft. And the ones who didn't volunteer for the field, too frail or far gone...

Holmes followed the old woman shuffling down the hallway in her labcoat, a thick bandage not entirely concealing the third ear growing out of her wrist. "How long have you been 'volunteering' federal employees as test subjects?"

A fugitive smile lifted the corner of Sam's mouth. "That's classified."

"So you bought your team of Igors a one-way ticket to the Sandbox to clean house?"

"It's not like that. Our latest research has had...unforeseen side effects, and Pale Fire presented a real solution for the test subjects, for everybody."

"But you didn't kill a useful informant for the sake of science," said Holmes, pointing at the printer, "Why is there a plastic skull in your office?"

Sam glanced at the dog portraits while thinking of an answer. Another NASA gift, each portrait depicted a dog fired into space by the Russians to test space capsules later used by men. He'd had a running conversation with those portraits for the past three months.

Sam lifted the skull from the printer but avoided gazing into it's eye sockets, not wanting his grief boiled down to bad theater. "He was the last person to see my brother's body. But he wouldn't tell me where."

Holmes said nothing and gathered up the report to keep his hands busy, though the paper felt heavier now. "What would you have me do?"

"Just bring me his bones. He should be buried here," he said, turning away to signal the meeting was over, "He should come home."

(*)

The wind never let up in this part of the country. Holmes listened to sand sizzle against the innkeep's window, the distant houses appearing and disappearing in the white-out like an Arabian fairy tale.

Holmes rested his feet on a bloody sack, disguised as a farmhand, claiming his boss had paid him to take infected chickens out to the desert to be burned. Whenever locals asked what the chickens had, he began coughing violently, and they found excuses to be elsewhere.

The innkeep patted him on the shoulder. "You sleeping here tonight?"

In truth Sam had supplied him with little cash and a Pashto dictionary so outdated Holmes had fed it to his donkey, and he wondered if the Department of Defense was that strapped for resources or if they didn't expect him to come home alive. For answer, two stealth bombers cut across the sky, and finishing his tea he asked the innkeep how much a motorbike sold for and rode off into the desert.

The storm was even worse further out. By the time he came within a mile of the team's last known coordinates he could barely see his hand in front of his face, and he walked the bike with his head bowed into the wind. He encountered neither road nor track nor any other sign of life.

Thrusting his hand into the sack, he ruminated on the underutilization of bees for sniffing out criminals, their incalculable skill for memorizing a new scent and then seeking it out en masse. He wondered what kind of honey a prison would produce. Or a morgue. He'd have to experiment when he got home.

The first chicken opened under his thumbs, the cylinder of a microscope secreted within. He'd hated to kill them, but border guards were no joke and he couldn't operate without a lab, and using his cloak as a makeshift tent he screwed bloody parts together and began taking soil samples. Washington has a signature mix of loam and plastic and coffee found nowhere else, to the trained eyed at least, and after many painstaking hours he was able to estimate the direction the team had taken.

The landscape changed, flat lakebed giving way to scrubland and eventually to a series of caves that pockmarked the mountains, some bottomless, some only a waist-deep, giving the overall impression that Holmes was walking across a giant bath sponge. It was by one of these caves that he noticed a clump of mud a foot off the ground, as if someone had scraped their boot on the side of the wall before entering. He clicked on his flashlight and waved it around inside.

"Hello?"

A shot struck the ground between his feet. He pulled his canteen from an inner pocket and shook it invitingly. "I've got apple juice. I had to carry it a long way, I wait any longer I'll have to toss it."

The silence stretched, and eventually Holmes got a whispered reply and ducked his head past the lip of the cave. He walked in total darkness, the flashlight exposing wet rock like a circle cut out of black paper until he lit upon the other man's eyes.

Sherlock held up his hands. "I'm unarmed."

Dean Winchester faced the entrance, assault rifle pushed into his hip, seated against a row of steel water drums the Afghani rebels had cached in preparation for the next Russian invasion. His right leg was bandaged and splinted with a length of driftwood. In the corner, a scarecrow had been fashioned out of old clothes with a charcoal face drawn on the wall above the collar. Holmes wondered if he'd interrupted something.

"What happened to your leg?"

Dean adjusted the grip on his gun, though clearly relieved to hear English again. "I fell."

"You fell?"

"I was pushed."

Holmes nodded and passed him the canteen. He would have offered some small fraction of the pharmacy he had sewn into his jacket, but he wanted the man coherent for questioning. "Your brother sent me. Someone reported you dead."

Dean took a small sip, tested his stomach, then went for more. "Dead how?"

"They found your body in the desert not far from here."

"Was I naked?"

Holmes narrowed his eyes, but Dean shook his head. "Never mind. Get me back to town and I can call in a ride to the embassy."

Holmes glanced at the barrel of the gun. "I was ordered to bring back all survivors. You had four others in your care."

Dean's lip curled, and Holmes guessed where he'd gotten the injury. He turned to the scarecrow instead. "Who's your friend?"

"It helps me think."

"It?"

He waited for Dean to lash out or drop his eyes in embarrassment. But to him the scarecrow was as equally necessary as the gun, perhaps more so. "Him."

Holmes nodded. "Did 'he' recommend you sleep in a cave when there's a clinic within crawling distance?"

"Is that what they told you?" said Dean, his voice flat, "Is that what they've been telling everyone?"

Dean tipped back his head and began to laugh at his own personal joke. It was a nice laugh, and utterly chilled Holmes to the marrow. Dropping the gun, Dean propped up his elbow and leaned his cheek against the back of his hand, closing his eyes and talking to someone other than Holmes.

"I'm so tired. We can't stay here."

Holmes pressed Dean's hand to drink more, and he did.

"You've been missing for six months."

"I told them they wouldn't find a cure," said Dean, wiping his chin, "They could barely walk on two legs by the time we got there..."

'They' must have been the scientists. Dean trailed off, listening to some inner dialogue as though the hand he leaned against were a telephone, and started talking again in fits.

"No one could read the machine's instructions. I don't think it's even a real language. We did all kinds of trials with the equipment we recognized, but they just got sicker and then we found that tape recording..."

Sherlock sat on his haunches, rubbing his head. The pills in his jacket whispered relief, but they would have to wait.

"They kept playing it over and over again. This sound. _Thum. Thum._ And then screaming. _Thum Thum..._ "

"I told them to turn it off, but they'd stopped talking to me by then. They wanted to see what else that thing could do..."

"I cut the engine while they were sleeping. Or whatever they do up in that room. They were so mad when I didn't fix it, their hands..."

Dean spread out his fingers, looking down as if to confirm he still had them. "They can't operate anything anymore. They can't even fit through the hatchway. They're too screwed up."

His eyes rested on the scarecrow, as if it had been about to speak before his gaze froze it in place. Holmes imagined Sam Winchester in his dreary Washington office, equally hobbled by pain and sleeplessness, filling in the gaps of this conversation with his dog portraits.

Holmes dug in. "How do I get inside the machine?"

Dean noticed him again. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

Dean pointed the gun over Holmes' head, but this time he curled in to make himself small. For a moment his hand flicked out to the scarecrow protectively. "He's out there. I can hear him at night."

Holmes strained his ears, and indeed he caught a low moan that rose and fell at intervals, too regular to be an echo from a neighboring cave. After a while it stopped and Dean lowered his gun and was himself again.

"I can help you get home," said Holmes carefully, "But a lot of important people with important warrants for your arrest are banking on photos of whatever miracle technology is hiding out there."

Dean smirked. "I thought I was a dead man. Dead men don't serve time."

"That's just paperwork. That's one number changed," said Holmes, holding his hands as if typing at a keyboard, "Clickety clack, bring the man back."

Holmes watched a progression of ugly ideas on Dean's face, then breathed out as Dean replaced his gun in his side holster. "They don't move much during the day. You get one hour in there to take pictures, then we're out. You do anything to compromise this plan, we will a) find you and b) fuck up your shit."

"This isn't your brother," said Holmes disgustedly, standing up and breaking the scarecrow apart with one kick, "Your brother's thousands of miles away. No one else is coming to help you."

Dean shook his head without taking his eyes off Holmes. "You're wrong."

And faster than Holmes would have credited him for, Dean touched him in five different places, lightly, as it pulling off pocket lint from his shoulders and headscarf, and suddenly Holmes kicked himself for not recognizing the innkeep for an informant. Dean swelled with pride. Five bugs, each no bigger than a pinhead but capable of locating a penny flipped into the Grand Canyon, lay in the palm of his hand.

He brushed his hands together. "Don't fuck with my little brother."

(*)

The entrance to the machine was impossible to tell apart from the neighboring caves unless you pressed your hand to it. It was like staring at the bottom of a birdbath through your own reflection, the steel wall projecting an image of craggy blonde stone three inches above the surface, and despite the summer heat was cool to the touch.

Sherlock bent down to examine the bottom. Thick metal stumps raised the machine off the ground. "What are those?"

Dean shifted on his bad leg. "What's what?"

"Those things on the bottom."

"Probably to keep the floor from rotting out during flood season."

"Not those," said Sherlock, reaching out to a series of holes in the dirt, "The marks they made."

Dean shaded his eyes against the wind. The dust storm was too thick to see more than a few feet in any direction, and Sherlock did not care to know how big it was. As big as a house? As big as a mountain? With something that size and that good at camouflage, neither man wanted to say the word 'footprints', as if that might give the machine ideas.

Sherlock stood up and brushed his hands on his slacks. "I don't see a way in."

"It's up there." said Dean, pointing at a spot thirty feet up.

Sherlock felt around blindly and discovered a handhold cut into the wall, two by two inches. "Our shoes won't fit in there."

Dean was already seated and unlacing his boots. "I know."

"What kind of clinic puts a front door that high off the ground?"

Dean said nothing and began to climb.

Whoever designed the machine had had long legs and never heard of guardrails, and Sherlock spent long moments on each step trying to keep his balance as his shoes dangled from his belt. Despite a bum leg, Dean has tremendous upper body strength and managed the journey with the speed and agility of a professional circus rigger, hopping from one handhold to the next without breaking a sweat. Sherlock followed slowly after. The edges dug into the soft flesh of his feet, and he did not look forward to the return descent.

Eventually they reached a hatchway that gave under pressure, and found themselves in a darkened staging area with crates and folding tables pushed against the wall. A low hum vibrated through the floor just below human hearing, like elephants calling to one another, and made the candy wrappers on the floor shiver. Sherlock shined his flashlight on the crates. All of them were stamped with Soviet insignia.

"The file said Russia dropped this two years ago," said Sherlock, running his thumb through the dust, "Does any of this look two years old to you?"

"Does any of this look Russian to you?" asked Dean, rapping against a wall with his knuckles, "I spent days going through this place, trying to take it apart, and you know what I didn't find? Wires. Here, lemme show you."

He dug between two seams in the wall, fingernails as hard as flat-head screwdrivers, and lifted away a metal plate to reveal the source of the hum. Sherlock shone the light on it for several seconds, then turned away. "It's a thermoelectric engine."

"A what?"

Sherlock pinched his nose, fighting the headache. "We're in a desert. Probably the entire structure was skinned with photovoltaic cells to capture sunlight and funnel the energy through a hydrogen core, meaning it's solid state and doesn't require wires for the power supply. Probably."

Dean shaped his mouth around a dirty word, but thought better of it. "Engines aren't that quiet."

Sherlock passed the light around and picked up a candy wrapper. The expiration date was twenty years old. "This one is."

Dean snatched the wrapper out his hand and threw it aside. "Don't you have pictures to take?"

Much like the outside, the machine's designer had never heard of stairs, and getting from one floor to the next required an excruciating amount of climbing, made worse by the lack of windows and having to carry a flashlight between their teeth. Fortunately the first room they came to appeared to the be the much-hailed clinic, though Dean hung back and let Sherlock enter first.

"We should look at that leg."

Dean shook his head. "I'm good here."

"That cave was filthy, you could have an infection."

Dean stared ahead. The room was empty save for a reclining metal chair bolted into the floor with a rusty drain pan attached to it and a plastic membrane covering it like a high-tech umbrella. Sherlock hesitated as well, but his curiosity far, far outweighed his fear, and the need to know pulled him into the room like an unholy riptide.

Sherlock looked everywhere but could not find a control panel. "Is this it?"

"This is it."

"But there's nothing to take pictures of," said Sherlock, checking to see if any equipment had been torn out of the walls, "Have you tried turning it on?"

Dean gave him a small, nasty smile. "You should try it on yourself."

Sherlock stopped in his tracks, ignoring Dean's sarcasm. "You're absolutely right."

The chair smelled clean, like sawdust kept in a dry shed. Closer examination of the membrane showed some advanced circuitry, but in patterns Sherlock had never seen before, and when he put his ear to it he heard the faint whir of cellular-level gearage. The hum was stronger here, wobbling behind his eyes and promising the return of his headache. Would the chair transform him as it had done the scientists? Or, like the bugs secreted onto him by the innkeep, would it plant something else in him, the headache born of lust for scientific conquest transformed into a new creature rising out of the top of his head like a periscope?

Sherlock pulled out his pocket knife. "Got a light?"

"I don't smoke."

"Oh well, let's hope this thing fixes tetanus then too." said Sherlock, as he cut a red light across his palm.

A light on the top corner changed colors as he lay back in the chair, trying to get comfortable. For a few seconds nothing happened, and Dean watched from the shadows with arms crossed and eyelids drooping. All that climbing had clearly taken its' toll.

"You should sit down."

Dean blinked hard and stood up a little straighter. "I'm fine."

"When was the last time you rested more than a couple of hours at a time? Days? Weeks?" Sherlock was the last person to dismiss crank theories, but Dean's little speech in the cave had unsettled him, and he couldn't let one sleep-deprived soldier's paranoid hallucinations bleed into the investigation.

Dean pointed at the chair. "It's about to start."

A sensor chimed within the membrane, a red line of light sweeping over his body, and then the pads beneath him ballooned upward as if inhaling, and Sherlock was sucked into the chair so hard that he could barely lift his head much less his injured hand. He stared at the rusty drain pan inches from his chin, and finally his eyes settled on the second hand on his watch. How long would a cut take to repair? A lost finger? A gouged eye?

Sherlock looked up. "Does it always do this?"

"You'll feel a pinch."

The red line scanned his uninjured hand for reference, and then Sherlock yelped, something pressing against the cut in his other hand like a hot iron. A fine rain of cellulose streamed from the membrane, red at first and then flesh-colored as layers of his hand were restored. Dean's eyes burned with intent, as if Sherlock might burst into a cloud of flesh and blood any second, and was disappointed when he didn't.

The chair powered down. Sherlock checked his watch (20 seconds) and flexed the skin back and forth beneath his flashlight, but there was no scar. There was no numbness. The cut had never been there.

"That was amazing."

Dean scratched his cheek. "Yeah."

Sherlock stood up. The clinic was not very big, perhaps a hundred square feet, so what was the rest of the building for? "Tell me where the scientists are."

Dean shook his head, and Sherlock balled up his fists, wishing John were here to step between them. "You can't keep something this important from the world."

"You think we're the first to find this place?" asked Dean, jabbing a thumb behind him toward the staging area, "You know what I think?"

"I already know what you think. You think other spies came and left and buried the reports inside of other reports because you're all a bunch of superstitious spooks who read one too many issues of _Martian Manhunter_."

"It's not a clinic. Clinics have..." said Dean, lost for words, "More to it."

"More what?"

But he understood Dean's point. He tried imagining the room full of people, moving about with purpose as they tended to their patients, but the patients were impossibly tall and the doctors were climbing the walls like spiders.

"Books, trash cans, I can't even find a pipe for tap water in this machine," said Dean, "You ever heard of a place this big that doesn't run water? What do they drink? How do they wash? Do they even have water where they come from?"

"Who's they?"

Dean bit his lip and Sherlock's suspicions of paranoia were confirmed. "We need to leave." said Dean.

"I won't."

Dean put his hand on his hip, right next to his holster, but Sherlock ignored the hint. "If you don't let me get word of this back home, I will kill you."

Dean studied him. He knew which death threats to take seriously. "Why kill me?"

"Because tens of thousands of people are lying in hospitals right now, burned, crushed, beyond help, and if you stand in the way of the only thing that will make them whole again," he said, showing his teeth, "Then your life is forfeit."

Dean was about to retort, when something slithered on the upper landing. Sherlock held a finger to his lips. The sound came again, and then changed direction. "What's upstairs?"

Dean unclipped his gun. "The navigation room."

"You think the scientists are there?"

"Doubt it," said Dean, checking the clip and then snapping it back in place, "Let's go check, if you're done here."

"I thought you wanted to leave."

Dean listened to the shadows, but whether he heard an intruder or the long-distance phone call from his brother's scarecrow, Sherlock was not privy to it. "I've got unfinished business."

(*)

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. Chapter 2

"Wait," said Sherlock, "There were only five of you to start with, who else could have possibly gotten in here?"

"I don't think he ever left."

"He who?"

Dean exhaled slowly through his nostrils, his jaw working. "Stay here."

Once Dean had gone, Sherlock swept his flashlight across the clinic for something he may have missed. All field hospitals were riddled with low-level propaganda, posters and pamphlets and hidden agendas scribbled between the margins. You learned to read a place eventually. But this place spoke no secret message, embodying neither fear nor hate, as impersonal as a street-sweeper left in park at two a.m.

Sherlock pulled the crumpled candy wrapper from his coat and laid it on the chair, torn side up. He turned off his flashlight this time as the lasers prepped for analysis, when something glimmered on the floor. Had Dean visited here yesterday? This place was dry as a bank vault, it could probably preserve a bootprint for decades.

He took off his boot and tapped out a spoonful of sand, pressing his cheek to the floor and blowing hard. When the dust cloud settled, he pulled out his phone and took pictures under the red light. By the time he finished, the chair had settled into silence and Dean stood in the doorway.

"What are you doing?"

"I wanted to see what the chair did with synthetic materials. What did you find upstairs?"

Dean wiped his hand on his shirt, though it looked clean to Sherlock. "Probably the joints expanding in the heat."

He was lying. Sherlock filed it away for later and looked at his phone screen. "What's your shoe size?"

For some reason this question made Dean uncomfortable. "12. Why do you ask?"

Sherlock's flashlight lit on the chair, where the candy wrapper sat crumpled but perfectly mended. "I've seen chairs like this in Russian bath houses. They're not cheap."

"So?"

"So it wasn't originally part of the machine's design, it was retrofitted in. This isn't a clinic. It's a bespoke workshop."

Sherlock held up the candy wrapper. "If you were hiking across the mountains, you would only pack the absolute essentials, food, water, shelter, you simply wouldn't have room for replacement parts. So what do you do if your tent breaks in a storm? You could wait for someone to show up with a spare..." he said, waving the wrapper in front of Dean, "Or you make a new one on site."

Dean snatched it out of his hand. "Don't push things in my face."

"Someone's been walking in here, recently, with bare feet. Was it one of the scientists? Was it you?"

Dean sidestepped the question. "You wanna hear that recording I told you about earlier?"

This side of the machine had seen more traffic, dents and dings and the black hatchmarks of soldier boots. They passed a room on their way, more crates and what appeared to be a bookshelf stocked with Russian tech manuals, but Dean gripped his coat and steered him along. Sherlock could always go back on his own. The hallway split, both doors boarded up with boxes pushed against them, and Dean climbed over the one on the left to a ragged hole in the ceiling.

"Here, take my hand." said Dean, his voice echoing in that space.

"Why is the door blocked?"

"It's faster this way."

Sherlock rose out of the hole and found Dean on top of a round tunnel no more than two feet in diameter that ran adjacent to the hallway. Sherlock wasn't sure why he thought of it as a tunnel, it would have been barely high enough for children to walk through. Voices unspooled from the other end. "Someone's playing music." said Sherlock.

Dean shouldered his gun. "That's not music."

And so balanced on top of the tunnel, they walked in hushed reverence as through a cathedral of industry, huge pistons and jointed metal arms extending so high into the shadows that Sherlock's flashlight did not touch the ends of them, above or below. He wished he had a penny to drop over the side. 

When they stopped, Dean pointed upward into a near vertical passageway, smooth on all sides at an eighty-degree angle with a trunk of gray light catching the dust motes. They'd have an easier time trying to climb up a trash chute.

"That's the navigation room?" asked Sherlock.

Dean nodded, and Sherlock ran his fingers over the metal beams caging them in on both sides. "Back in Washington I saw a tapestry with a picture of this place and the tracks it left behind," said Sherlock, the metal warping their reflections, "Have you ever tried driving it?"

"I didn't." said Dean, implying someone else had, and began shimmying up the passage on his elbows and knees.

Unlike the emptiness of the previous rooms, the navigation room walls were filthy and checkered with pale ghosts where someone had ripped out the equipment and left it to dangle. Broken glass crunched underfoot. More candy wrappers, though it appeared that the owner had tried sucking out the chocolate rather than tearing the plastic open. It would have looked less like a fight and more like the aftermath of a bad party, if not for the recording.

"That screaming...are those people?" asked Sherlock.

Dean covered his mouth and shook his head. "I don't know. I think so."

Sherlock looked out the window to a wide expanse of desert. "You were up here when it moved, weren't you."

"We didn't kill anybody, if that's what you're asking," said Dean defensively, "That recording was old when we got here."

It was as Dean described in the cave, a slow pounding that made the room rattle. _Thum. Thum._ Sherlock imagined those huge pistons operating. It must have been louder than the loudest rock concert. And then the screams rose, thousands of them, angry, confused, a great wall of noise only to be snuffed out by a high whine that could have been the buzz of an electric drill or a chorus of insects. A few seconds later the pounding continued.

 _Thum. Thum_.

"But other people have been here, why haven't the Russians told us about it before?"

"Because they were smart enough to leave and wipe it from the records. To forget it was ever here."

Sherlock glanced about for a volume button, his headache magnifying every shiny surface in the room. "Why would whoever built this abandon it?"

Dean stared at the patch of blue sky framed by steel. "Maybe the machine's like a toilet plunger. You only need it for one thing, so you leave it in the men's room. You wouldn't drag it home with you."

"But you're here," said Sherlock, closing in on Dean, "You stayed."

"Get away from me." he snarled.

"No," said Sherlock, closing on Dean's wrist, "You have an injured leg, but not bad enough to keep you from clambering all over this dump like a monkey in a banana factory. You could have gotten back to the village eventually."

Dean swallowed hard, and Sherlock could see that he was keeping several secrets and offering up a little one to cover the greater. And that one was not so little.

"This...thing is the size of a small town, but not all of it was built above ground. Somewhere buried out there is the other half of the machine that we detached from the first day we took it out for a spin, a bunker with enough supplies from the Russians to keep a man alive. And the device that opens that bunker entrance is still here somewhere."

"Why shouldn't we just get back on my motorbike and run home?"

"Because the scientists have been trying to repair the engine, and if they manage to get this thing up and running again, there's nowhere to run," said Dean, one hand balanced on his gun, "There's nowhere to go except down."

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. Chapter 3

They crowded around the steering wheel for signs of repair, beneath the gaze of a carved disc that might have been a religious icon or dashboard bobble head or perhaps both. Most of the paint had flaked off. Sherlock nearly took a photo, but instead reached out and flipped it upside down.

"What'd you do that for?"

"They had it the wrong way."

Dean wasn't sure which made him more nervous, that Sherlock had oriented himself to the proper feng shui of a weaponized mountain or, worse, the machine's owners were art collectors. "I'm gonna look underneath, can I borrow your knife?"

While Dean stretched out on the floor, Sherlock unwrapped his headscarf and cleaned the top of the disc until words appeared. Instructions? A name? It would look well in some kitchen over a kettle and plate of sandwiches, spider-legged neighbors trading heartfelt platitudes. Home Sweet Home.

Sherlock glanced out the window. "Where's my motorbike?"

Dean did not answer, and when Sherlock bent down he found him snoring, no doubt his first opportunity to lay flat inside four walls for weeks. Sherlock replaced the disk. The bike's path led straight back to the machine, which meant either Dean had stolen it when he'd left Sherlock in the chair room, or a third party was onboard.

The trek on the pipe felt longer the second time, as if the machine had dilated in his absence, and he tried not to think of the hulking archways as a ribcage. Back in the hallway, the blocked passage remained undisturbed, and several minutes heavy lifting proved to Sherlock that one person could not have gotten past in the amount of time they'd been away. That left the reading room.

Dean had been asleep for an hour, and Sherlock's flashlight lit from title to book title, estimating how long each would take to examine. Too long. He pulled off a stack of classified folders with the dates crossed out in black, then laid those aside for a soldier's diary. The poetry was surprisingly thought-out, verses struck through and revised in several shades of ink, and with different handwriting. How many times had the Russians returned here?

He lifted the flashlight to the ceiling...and found only more bookshelves. A faint draft pulled at the papers in his hand. He looked up with the flashlight off, but his night vision was shot and the whole room (elevator shaft? missile silo?) looked like a purple bruise. He turned in a half-circle, cramped between crates and the door, and eventually found a footprint in the space between two plastic binders.

About thirty feet up his headache evaporated. His hands were slippery with sweat and if he fell it might be hours before Dean found him, but curiosity propelled him upward. Fifty feet and his limbs began to ache. It hurt to swallow, and he remembered that all his water was on the motorbike. A hundred feet and the books began to change, from government documents to loose-leaf paper to packing straw mixed with driftwood, and when he knocked some books over they took a long, long time to fall.

Eventually he climbed far enough back in time to find nothing but compost, ghosts of books stuck together. One of them bore the title "Project Pale Fire" with a key taped inside, and he jammed his flashlight between his teeth and pulled it away from some rags shoved in the back. An old sleeping bag ripped free from the shelf, an American eagle embroidered on the side. It smelled like hot garbage. The stains shone black in the light, and Sherlock followed it down as, slowly, the bag unfurled, and bones burst into powder at the bottom.

He watched it for several minutes, afraid to look back at the shelf, at the hole between the books that sucked all the air out of the room. He shined the light on the very edge, where a tiny bone fragment remained, and then a few inches further back, and then a few inches further back. A whistle like wind over a glass bottle. Wrecked bodies jammed at odd angles in a thick white webbing. The light shook in his hand. A pair of eyes burned far back in the distance.

"Hello?"

He pulled himself in by his fingertips, head crushed in that narrow space, and stretched his hand to clear the cobwebs from the man's face. "Can you hear me?"

A snuffling noise echoed from up top, beams creaking beneath some great weight. Had something awoken? He turned his head sideways for a closer look, and began to scramble backwards even before the man pleaded,

"Move. Under. Ground."

The room lurched. And then Dean Winchester's mouth exploded in a cloud of spiders, and Sherlock fell screaming into the shadows below.

TBC 


	4. Chapter 4

Sherlock replayed the first death he'd ever witnessed, the woman on her knees begging for a phone call. Water slapped against the docks. Black lightning split the horizon. Afterwards her family had bought a beautiful marble headstone, and the papers spent three weeks theorizing about terrorist sympathies in her past, all of which were fabricated and eventually turned into a hit TV series. He latched onto the edge of a shelf. Damned if he was going to die alone with a mouthful of spiders.

He'd flown halfway down and kicked until his toes found purchase, eyes wide and lips clamped shut. Tiny feet tickled his face, and he let them.

The banker's death had been the easy part. Disposing of the body with a dull knife had taken hours. He'd wanted to stop a hundred times, and each time he'd told himself, "Just do this next bit, and then you can be sick." Reaching for the shelf above, careful to brush aside any tiny new neighbors, he followed the same mantra, pulling his weight, breathing in, attaboy. And again.

They were inside his shirt now, seeking the moist corners of his body, and the larger ones fell to the bottom of the shaft with a crack. More poured out until half the books boiled with activity and began to cave in. How much did spiders weigh? How much did a million of them weigh? He blinked them away and climbed on.

He almost went past Other Dean, but shined the light on him and, with more bravado than he felt, waded through the nest until their faces were inches apart. Fingers of dead men trailed in his hair. The webbing on the wall breathed in and out, pregnant with more to come.

Sherlock pointed the flashlight under his mouth. "Where's the engine room?"

Dean coughed, a thick line of blood rolling down his face and onto the shelf until it connected with Sherlock's hand. He remained unmoved. "Up there." Dean croaked.

"Did you do it? Is the machine working?"

Dean closed his eyes, and Sherlock took it for a yes. The scientists had had months to churn out facsimiles of their last healthy colleague, to threaten, to wear down until the later copies submitted to repairing what the original progenitor had destroyed, kept awake until they collapsed and were traded out for fresh meat. A revolving door of Dean Winchesters.

Sherlock unsnapped his coat. "I spoke to your brother a few days ago. He wants you to come home."

Dean kept his eyes shut, trying to remember what Sam looked like, or if he'd ever met him at all. He felt something brush his mouth. A little green pill balanced on the tip of Sherlock's finger, birthday cards and summer vacation and fresh cut grass all rolled into a candy shell. A dream, or a nicer dream than being stuffed on a shelf like expired groceries.

Sherlock waited patiently. "You have to swallow it. If you don't swallow it, you won't get better."

Two gray tears swam in Dean's eyes. "I want my brother."

This was not true. He had never met his brother, locked away with the borrowed memories of another man and never knowing if they were real or imagined. But the ability to love sets men apart from the spiders and the desert and mute stars above their heads, and he needed to measure his heart once before something greater measured him.

Sherlock dusted off his phone and scanned through the photo gallery until he found a grainy headshot of Sam. It was a year old and taken through the window of a cafe, but Sam was clearly enjoying his paperwork with a pencil tucked behind his ear. Had Sam known then what Dean knew know? How much of this debacle had been planned in advance?

Sherlock cleared his throat. "I have some questions about the file here. There's no record of what happened to the scientists before they arrived here. How does fixing the engine help them?"

Dean smiled at him as if it were the wrong question. All of the spiders had withdrawn to the other bodies, leaping from one to another in the silent glittering webwork like children on a snowbank. Sherlock stopped to blow one off his shoulder, but when he looked back Dean was still smiling. The tears were gone and his eyes had lost their depth. He had lost a dream. He had gotten better.

Sherlock pressed Dean's eyes closed, and left the spiders to their spinning.

TO BE CONTINUED


	5. The Engine Room

Sherlock's flashlight began to falter before he reached the top. Little legs tickled the back of his neck, and he wondered how many spiders a person swallowed over a lifetime.

The Russians had been up here. Coolant hoses ran along the hallway, some disappearing into a hole in the wall, others criss-crossing the ceiling in a latticework so thickly layered it blocked out the sun from the room's lone window. Doors opened to empty rooms. Trash bags leaked beneath a sign he couldn't read. Some enterprising soul had looped the hoses together with bits of shoelace, and turning off his flashlight he grabbed the nearest hose and followed it in the dark. 

When the weight of the air changed, he turned on the light and was greeted by two makeshift tables made out of crates and...stone? Had the scientists been too superstitious to use materials readily available on the Machine? Microscopes were stacked on top of lab notes, the latest technology and custom-made from the look of it. Clearly American. Or maybe Chinese, he wasn't sure yet. 

Sherlock leafed though the file. Despite public support, Project Pale Fire had their budget cut three times in the first year, and the scientists had to make do with butterflies in lieu of human test subjects. Though the butterflies were caged separately, some cross-breeding was to be expected, and it was remarked that if a butterfly had 51% or more DNA of a particular species, the Machine automatically tailored the insect to that specie. A Red Copper might become a Painted Lady. It might, as in the case of a butterfly scanned in a petri dish full of sheep blood, learn to grow wool. Or it might, as in the case of a Monarch scanned with an extremely rare breed of Skipperling, learn that it was alone in the world and died from lack of a mate. 

You had to be careful under the microscope. You might find you've become an endangered species.

He found neither names nor dates on any of the papers under the microscopes, all of it hand-written in increasingly choppy cursive. He read notes at random.

_"Table simulation analysis yielded positive results in the males, but abnormal cell growth continues in subjects W and P."_

_"Only to be engaged in stage-specific catastrophe and then utilized for biosphere recapture and colonization. Extinction rates predicted at 91% +/-3 margin of error."_

He blinked. Were they still talking about butterflies? Something moved behind him, but when he shined his flashlight he only found an old leather shoe. He returned to the papers.

_"R experiencing unregulated growth in chest cavity, but no percievable organ damage. P's hair follicles appear to have changed shape."_

_"Gross motor skills problematic. Lack of clocks makes it hard to track time. Increased sense of isolation. Replicating tissue and increased muscle mass has made it impossible to leave. R took one sedative every hour for ten hours and still has not slept."_

_"The nightmares are getting worse. P suffers loss of purpose and R finds himself identifying more and more with test subjects from the original experiment in Washington. Upping the sedatives to 135 ml."_

_"No changes in mental faculty. Enhanced sense of smell and night vision. W has lost use of his thumbs and woke up to find them fused into the sides of his hands."_

The most recent paper was in a different handwriting and nigh unreadable, as if the writer had taken notes with his pen taped to one end of a yardstick. It had only two words.

_"IT WORKS."_

The key lay taped to the last page of the file, and pulling it free he twisted it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. Like the disc he'd discovered in the steering room, it was made of stone and classically made, a circle ridged on the inside with two prongs about as long as his hand. It didn't look like a key at all. Dean had only called it a key because "mouth with legs growing out of it" would have been too fucking scary.

He put in his coat pocket when he heard the shuffling noise again, just off to his left. A muffled panic began to creep in his guts. His flashlight died and he slapped it back to life, casting it around and resisting the urge to shout "hello?". He strained his ears, but he couldn't tell if it were the sand sliding across the Machine outside or actually right next to him. He held his breath, stayed absolutely still, until the only sound was the blood rushing through his head, but still the noise was there.

He lifted his flashlight. The noise was now coming from the other side of the table, too close to the wall for him. He would have to bend down and look.

And there, wedged between packing crates, was the leather shoe. Except it was quiet now, was just sitting there. It had never moved. Had it?

He reached over and picked it up. It was soft, and blood warm.

It was then that a low moan echoed from across the room, and his flashlight flickered once, twice, and went out altogether.

(*)

TO BE CONTINUED


	6. The Lab

Sherlock willed the darkness to thin, like waiting for faces to develop in a negative, but the moan faded and he remained blind.

"Dean?"

He clutched the corner of the table, papers sliding to the floor. Slipping off his shoes for fear of attracting attention he lay the file with the others and pocketed the key and walked toward the noise.

Agent Sam Winchester had a number of tics, but one stood out in particular to Sherlock. Not in the way Sam spoke during their brief interview, but rather the way he distanced himself, the ease at which he displayed the plastic skull, a casual cruelty that launched personnel into the void in the hopes of recovering his brother. That might have allowed a department to experiment on its' own scientists until they were no longer recognizably human.

Sherlock went over his inventory. A clone with a busted leg, possibly compromised by the stress of isolation. A key to a safehouse. A disk in an otherwise burgled navigation room. His headache returned, and he fought the urge to check his clothes for more bugs but decided it was safer to leave them in place.

He returned to the photos of the butterflies, their wings choked with color. But their beauty had come with a price, and he imagined the Machine confusing him with some other organic material on his person, his shirt fused to his skin, cotton stalks rising from his eye sockets.

He walked across the room, listening to control panels and other instruments humming in the walls and desparately wishing for a sample jar. What kind of alien marker might he find under the microscope, what compost of metal and bones and space trash, pointing to cities unknown?

Sam's little smirk itched in the back of his brain. _Classified_. Can I get some answers? _Classified_. Are they going to kill me now? _Classified_. Where's the exit out of here? _Classified_. Sherlock penned a request to High Command in his mind, begging a higher security clearance so he might have lab access to Dean's dead clone, before he too disappeared into the black hole of 'Classified'.

The key padded against the inside of his jacket, and he wound his sweaty fingers around it. It was then that he realized he'd left his shoes behind, and that he was still holding the leather shoe he'd found under the table. Would that go in the report? Should he tell Dean about the clones? Hello, so sorry about the death of your evil twin, he died on a shelf with a mouthful of spiders, here's a casserole.

He had just made out the flickering outline of a door when his flashlight sputtered to life, and at the same time his fingers met with a gap in the wall. He shone it through. 

A pale watery eye blinked back at him. Sherlock squeezed the shoe in his hand as if hoping for some sympathetic response, a cry from a cub to its' mother, but it was just a shoe after all.

He angled the light and found the moaner, fluid the color of old bruises leaking out his mouth. Hadn't there been four scientists? Two more sat in the corner, silent, crouched against the wall in white labcoats. Staring. Reaching for something with their flabby arms. Gently rubbing them against their cheeks.

Sherlock's shoes.

He reached for the door, but his hand met something warm. Bristled. Breathing. 

The creature's girth blocked the flickering blue light of a TV, a video of soldiers on horseback fleeing to the shelter of the nearby caves. Hard young men in white robes, the soldiers might have been from the 1970's. They might have been from six thousand years ago. A great shadow rose over them, as mechanical arms from behind the camera unsheathed drills the size of houses and burrowed into the caves in a gout of stone and bloody mist. 

Sherlock stepped sideways, swallowed a scream as his bare foot stepped on something sharp. Navigation equipment formed a horseshoe around the room, chirping and hot to the touch. He sat down hard and clutched his foot, the sock already stained red.

In the video, the camera retracted to a wide panoramic shot of the desert, the mechanical arms slotting into other Machines camoflauged as mountains, and on and on, until it dropped it's disguise and revealed, not a mountain range, but a chain of identical machines that had been patiently self-replicating over the millenia. A combine harvester three miles high and five hundred miles wide, plowing the top six feet of earth in it's wake. Scrubbing the planet clean.

Failing to notice Sherlock, the fourth scientist stabbed the air with a remote control. Rewound the video. Played it again.

"Hee. Hee. Hee."

(*)

Dean started, looked blearily at the bloody hand shaking his shoulder. At the gun pointed at his face. "The hell happened to you?"

Sherlock tightened his grip. "Are there any bugs in my skull?" 

"You asking if Sam planted a GPS chip in your brain?"

"No I'm asking if my free will has been compromised by intelligent spiders," Sherlock snapped, though only half-serious, "Can Sam trace our location or not?"

Dean looked at the bloody handprint on his shirt, looked up again. "What did you find up there?"

"Later, when we're out of here," said Sherlock, eyes casting about the room, "The engine's already geared up, you have to lead us to town before this thing starts moving."

"I want my gun back."

"You ever dream about the end of the world Dean?"

"...I don't have to dream."

"No. No I don't think you do."

Even had Sherlock's motorbike not been stolen, the wind made it impossible to navigate out of the desert. Snatching his gun back, Dean dropped to his hands and knees, clawing at the dirt. "Fuck, the storm's covered everything."

Sherlock grabbed his arm. "We have to run."

"No the door was right here," Dean said, pushing him away, "I dug it up yesterday, help me find the door."

"Dean, even if the bunker is real..."

The earth ruptured, cracks zig-zagging between their feet and pouring smoke as the Machine powered up, liquifying the desert beneath it into molten slag. Crispy blackened skeletons dislodged themselves from gearage and shattered to the ground. Somewhere above all the noise Sherlock could hear laughter.

With another pull on Dean's sleeve the two men staggered forward, their injuries forgotten. "Which way is east?!" Sherlock shouted.

Dean said nothing. Sherlock shouted to him, but Dean gazed ahead, and as Sherlock walked beside him, he too noticed a figure walking through the white-out, against the sulfurous sunset burning the edge of the mountains. A tall, powerfully built shadow outlined by the sand, dust spinning at his feet.

Sherlock recognized him from the mugshots. Naked save for the army issue boots. So bronzed from the sun that he dematerialized every time the sand kicked up. And he was marching toward Dean. And Dean, gun trembling in his hands, eyes wide with fear. 

For Dean Winchester, the original, stood before him, mad, eyes bleached white by the sun, and behind him the storm howled like an oncoming train, the ground shivering in seismic anticipation. 

He put a hand to his facsimile's face, tracing his mouth, his eyes, with long yellow nails. Sherlock realized then that the moans he'd heard earlier hadn't been that of a monster, but a beacon, seeking out its' missing half.

Original Dean dropped his hand, his voice like rock sliding over rock.

"Where's Sam?"

Copy Dean was silent a moment, puzzled and oddly hurt by this question, that he should go unconsidered, was so far from his progenitor's orbit. "I don't know. I've never met him."

Original Dean fixed with a milky stare. "What are your orders?"

"Sir, to establish contact with the Russian laboratory---"

"What are your orders?"

Sherlock watched the memory uncurl in the back of Copy Dean's mind, the smell of rain and burning hair. "...to watch out for my baby brother."

Original Dean nodded, looking past him at something Sherlock couldn't see, then took something from around his neck and pushed it into his copy's hand. Instructions too soft for Sherlock to make out. Fingertips lingering on the object. Then he walked away, into the storm, blurred against the mountains, until the darkness swallowed him and he vanished back into the dead heart of the East from whence he came.

"What did he give you?" asked Sherlock.

Dean looked inside his hand, piecing this new information with the memories he'd inherited. "He said Sam would recognize it."

Sherlock cast about. "There's something nearby, he was listening for it."

"I don't hear any---"

Sherlock held up his finger. Shut his eyes. "There. It just stopped," he said, training his finger on the direction of the noise, "The motorbike."

The temperature dropped, cool air skating over their sunburned arms. The moon rose, another haunted face, another mirror to Dean Winchester's inconsolate wandering.

A red dot appeared over Dean's heart. Sherlock saw the gun before he saw the soldier, saw himself refracted in the insectoid eye windows of the army gas mask. Dean started to tell him to point the gun somewhere else, but then realized it didn't matter where the gun was.

"Raise your hands."

They obeyed, Dean's gun smacking the ground. The soldier's armor was American, sleek lines over the kind of plastic physique you only got in a professional gym, but his posture was sloppy, like an agent long absent from the field.

"State your name."

Dean swallowed, the words chalky in his mouth. "Dean Winchester, contracted for American reconnaissance mission Pale Fire."

"Who sent you?"

Sherlock turned his head a fraction, wondering if Dean had planned this far ahead, but Dean stared back defiantly. "I'm under no obligation to compromise the identity of my handler."

The red dot moved to his raised right hand. "What's that?"

Dean's hand closed hard over it, and there was a muffled pop as the gun fired six inches from his ear. The soldier took another step forward, shoulders hunched, all his cool professionalism gone. 

"Open your hand you son of a bitch."

"No. I need it." said Dean, not willing to share what Original Dean had given him.

"Toss it to me, or I will empty this clip and take it from you."

Sherlock believed him. He'd read the soldier's files. He was an excellent shot and there was less than twenty feet between them. 

Dean looked at the soldier, black uniform so out of place against the backdrop of the seething desert, and dropped his hands. 

The soldier was shouting now, "Where is he?!"

"Where's who?"

"What did you do with his body?!"

The gun was right up against Dean's chest now, pulling up his shirt. The soldier's voice was very low now, dangerous. "You're not him. You're *not* him, you're a fake, he never radioed in, he should be dead. He's dead."

Dean searched the other man's eyes, a composite of memories both real and imaginary rising to form a history he dared not hope for, for fear he'd dreamt it. For fear of being rejected as a construct. For fear that the world would not permit him to be happy.

Dean reached up with his free hand. Pulled the strap on the side of the soldier's mask, let it fall. The wind tangled the hair on their heads, their bodies surrounded by a corona of dying sunlight. 

Sam kept the gun on him. The years had landed hard over the past six months, his eyes lined, cheekbones sharpened by grief. 

"Where is he? The real Dean?"

Dean motioned helplessly toward the desert. 

"Are there more of you?"

"No. I killed the others."

"They came to our house," said Sam, angrily, "These two marines from Casualty Affairs, they knocked on the front door and I had to pretend I hadn't already found out through intel. That I hadn't found out weeks before."

Tears scrolled down his face and Dean listened to him cry. Listened to a thousand borrowed memories of his baby brother crying and cherished every one.

"What's in your hand?"

Dean opened his fist, where a brass amulet gleamed on the end of a string. Dirty. Chipped. A child's treasure, and as heavy a responsibility as he could bear. 

"It's your soul."

(*)

TO BE CONTINUED


End file.
